Using cremain weight from a Bronze Age cemetery in Eastern Hungary as an indicator of sex

Summary

In well-preserved osteoarchaeological samples, traditional anthropological methods are employed to determine age at death, biological sex, differences in diet, activity level, pathologies, and genetics. Determining sex based on classical anthropological methods such as examining morphological and metric traits is often difficult or impossible with cremains due to fragmentation and post-depositional damage. A previous study conducted by Van Deest et al. in 2013 showed a correlation between cremain weight and sex using a modern sample. At the Békés 103 site, a Bronze Age cemetery and settlement in Eastern Hungary, 61 burials had been found by the end of the 2014 season, the majority of which are cremations interred in urns. In our study, total cremain weights were analyzed to see if sex could be determined from urns belonging to adult individuals. Weight-based determination of sex was then compared to results based on morphological and metric traits. Results show that weight estimations of biological sex did not match the results from morphological and metric traits when available.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Studying the Past with Fragments from the Fire: Student Research on an NSF-REU Field School

Keywords

Spatial Coverage